Production • Processing • Handling
Organisational integrity key to safe, efficient operation and management
Many of the risks facing oil and gas operators are related to organisational as well as asset integrity failures. Beatrijs van de Ven reports.
M
anaging risks is one of the most important functions within asset management, as oil and gas companies seek to avoid incidents that can have a far-reaching negative
impact on their business. But the root causes of incidents are not always directly related to the physical assets themselves. In many cases organisational and human factors have a big role to play. “Each individual needs to understand the core concepts involved in effective integrity management, and how their own actions can have a decisive impact,” says Jos Van der Aelst, Principal Consultant at Stork Technical Services. Out of the complex
Fig. 1. The ‘Swiss cheese model’, showing the series of barriers to prevent incidents and to minimise their impact as far as possible.
Fig. 2. The building blocks required to implement organisational integrity, extending from defining the required values right through to their implementation in practice.
portfolio of risks to which oil and gas companies are exposed, many are in fact associated with the processes and systems in place and with human factors in the operation and management of the facilities and assets. Tat’s why an organisational integrity culture is not just an afterthought, something to be addressed separately, but it needs to be embedded in the operational and asset management systems, and integrity has to be embodied in the people themselves. In the context of the oil and gas industry,
a broad definition of organisational integrity is: Integrated, consistent approaches and behaviour leading to ‘knowing what are the right things to do and doing the right things’.
Root causes of incidents Oil and gas companies are facing a lot of risks. Tese may be financial and commercial, as well as related to the actual operation and management of facilities and assets. Tese risks can lead to minor or major incidents with a potentially wide-ranging impact on the company’s business values - for example in areas like health, safety, security, the environment, profitability, customer delivery, asset lifetime, image, license to operate etc. Investigations of incidents show that the root
causes were not only asset-related, but in many cases were related to a lack of organisational integrity. Some of the reported causes were:
● Te organisation was not adequately prepared for incident management.
● Te required resources were lacking. ● Personnel did not show the desired behaviour, and this was tolerated by management.
● Te right processes and procedures were not in place.
To ensure that potential causes like these do not lead to incidents, oil and gas companies need to install a series of barriers from both the asset and organisational points of view. Te ‘preventive’ barriers have the task of avoiding incidents. While if despite the presence of these barriers a hazard still turns into an incident, a series of ‘mitigation’ barriers is needed to minimise the impact of the incident as far as possible. Tese barriers are represented by the ‘Swiss cheese model’ shown in Fig. 1.
Achieving organisational integrity Achieving an organisational integrity culture requires the implementation and maintenance of a series of fundamental building blocks (see Fig. 2). Tese
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